Elluminate didn't shine last night!

I forgot to write about my Workgroup's chat session last night. I was so organized in that I booked the free Elluminate room and sent the invitations out to Joyce and Nathalie in lots of time. I opened the room at 7 pm to ensure it was in good working order and then returned at 9:50 pm only to see that the connection had timed out so I had to log back in.
When 10 pm my time arrived, it didn't work for us!! It was loading very slowly for Joyce and when she did get on, her audio was all crackly. Nathalie didn't have speakers, a microphone or a webcam so we wouldn't have been able to hear her anyway. And I must've sent the moderator's link instead of the participants link to everyone, so when they logged on in Vancouver and New Zealand, there were three of me logged on as participants! It was too ironic - here we are all studying 'emerging technology' and we couldn't use it or rather, it didnt' work for us! So we decided to go with MSN! It was great that we could all type quickly and the meeting went well. I initially thought we wouldn't have a very good meeting if we were using MSN and typing on the keyboard instead of hearing and seeing each other. However, when I asked Joyce and Nathalie how they felt about it at the end, they said it was just fine and it didn't matter that we didn't have an Elluminate session after all.

Spoiled Already by Technology!

Being part of this course is addictive - I went to sleep at 2 am last night and was up at 6 am - couldn't wait to get to work so I could MSN with Peter about Elluminate. In my dreams it came to me that Joyce, Nathalie and I wouldn't be able to see and hear each other if we met tonight using Windows Messenger. That's what I have become accustomed to when I meet online now. I use the videocam feature in Windows Live Messenger every night with my friend in Al Ain. Peter referred me to the Elluminate website where I booked a free room for three participants. I waited for the confirmation email from Elluminate, clicked on the link for my private room and invited my two friends. Awesome stuff!

Elluminate - Session 2

Another early morning for me as I participated in our second Elluminate session at 5 am!! It was nice to meet colleagues from all over the world. Using Elluminate with voice and webcam makes you feel you're in the same room with everyone. The only thing missing are the handshake and refreshments! Interesting to note that a few of us were 'disconnected' from the session for some reason, however, it was easy to log back in. There were some audio problems causing a lot of echoing, but hopefully that will be worked out soon. Although it is suggested we use a headset with microphone, I used a headset but spoke in the microphone that comes with my laptop, and didn't have a problem with echo. It's important to remember to change the audio preferences to mute the speaker when talking.

Tonight, taking Penelope's suggestion, I edited the video that's a few posts down, in Windows Movie Maker. Because the video can't be seen in Full Screen, I added text to explain each frame since they are so small. Hope it makes the video more useful.